Study of the voiceless plosives /p, t, k/ in the spontaneous speech of Maracay: acoustic approximations

Abstract

This research is a study of the voiceless stops /p, t, k/ in the spontaneous speech of Maracay. Its purpose is to acoustically analyze the voiceless stops /p, t, k/ in the Maracay Sociolinguistic Corpus (CSCM). To this end, the study determines the acoustic features, duration, frequency of use, and phonetic contexts. The study is descriptive in nature. The sample consists of 1,241 acoustic realizations of the stops /p, t, k/ from two informants. The Praat software was used for data processing. Among the findings, a considerable percentage of voiced voices (20.62%) of the voiceless stops was detected in the selected sample. The results of this study show that the informants exhibit transformations in their speech not predicted by the Natural Polysystemic Model (MPN), especially at the pre-nuclear or pre-vocalic level. In the post-nuclear syllabic system, processes described in the MPN occurred, such as the loss of the consonant segments /k/ and /p/.